Besides, ninety-nine out of a hundred in Richie Parsons’ position would have realized they could beat the rap without half trying. Monday morning, you go to see the Captain. You’re all bruised up, because Greery kicked the hell out of you. You look scared and remorseful and hang-dog. You throw yourself on the Captain’s mercy. You tell him this is the first time you’ve ever done anything like this, and you don’t know what made you think you could get away with it. You mention — not as an excuse, because you know and admit there isn’t any excuse for your terrible behavior, but just in passing — you mention the fifty-dollar allotment (out of your eighty-four-dollar a month pay) that you are sending home to your widowed mother. The Captain looks at your Service Record and sees that you do have a fifty-dollar allotment made out to Mama, and that your father is dead. He sees how contrite and terrified you are, and he sees that you’ve had the crap kicked out of you. So he gives you a stern chewing-out, and lets you go, with the warning that next time you’ll be court-martialed. You go back to the barracks, where every-body joins in to kick the crap out of you again, and it’s all over and forgotten. And you don’t do any more stealing until you’ve been reassigned somewhere where nobody knows you.
Ninety-nine out of a hundred people could have figured that out, and acted accordingly. Richie Parsons never did go along with the group, not in anything.
Richie Parsons went AWOL.
He packed a small suitcase, stuffing some uniforms and underwear into it, put on civilian slacks and shirt and jacket, and took the base bus to the front gate. East St. Louis was down the road to the left, to the west. Richie headed to the right, to the east.
The only sensible thing he did was bring along a complete uniform. They’d told him in basic training what the difference was between AWOL and Desertion. When you were AWOL, you figured to come back some day. When you Deserted, you planned to never come back. And the evidence that counted was your uniforms. If you threw your uniforms away, or sold them, or pawned them, then you weren’t planning to come back. You were a Deserter. If you held on to your uniforms, you were planning to come back. You were only AWOL. The difference being that Deserter gets a Dishonorable Discharge, and somebody who’s AWOL gets thirty days in the stockade.
Richie Parsons wasn’t planning on coming back to Air Force, not ever. But he remembered the ground rules of the game, so he brought along a complete uniform, just in case he was caught.
He headed east across Illinois, hitchhiking, terrified of cops and Air Police and just about every adult he male saw. He got a few rides, across Illinois and southern Indiana and into Kentucky, and up through the tobacco fields of Kentucky toward the Ohio border and Cincinnati. And one ride he got left him in Newport, Kentucky, at nine o’clock on Monday evening. The old farmer who’d given him the ride pointed out the direction to the bridge for Cincinnati, wished him luck, and putted away down a side street. Richie started walking, lugging his suitcase.
He was running, and he was scared. He didn’t know where to go, he didn’t know what to do. He knew only that he couldn’t go home, to Albany, New York. He knew the Air Police would first look for him there, and they would watch his house. He couldn’t go home.
And he didn’t know anyone at all anywhere else in the world. Billions and billions of people in the world, and he knew only a handful of them. A few relatives and schoolmates in Albany. A few guys who hated him at Scott Air Force Base. He didn’t know anybody at all anywhere else in the whole wide world.
He had about sixty dollars left. He’d gone through the barracks like a vacuum cleaner before he left, grabbing bills, change, rings, watches, electric razors, everything he found that could possibly be turned into cash. He’d had to carry the stuff on him all weekend, but today, Monday, he had pawned his way across Kentucky, leaving one or two pieces of stolen property in every pawnshop he saw. All he had left now were a watch and a high-school ring, and the pawnshops were closed at that hour. They would go tomorrow.
He was hungry. He hadn’t eaten since ten o’clock this morning. He decided to find a diner or something here in Newport, before walking to Cincinnati and hitchhiking farther on to wherever it was he was going.
He was on Third Street, with Schwerner Boulevard just ahead. Down at the corner was a diner, with a modest red neon sign saying, “Third Street Grill.”
He walked faster, feeling the hunger pangs inside him. He got to the diner and pushed on the door, but nothing happened. He looked through, and saw that the diner was all lit up. A skinny, stringy woman in a soiled white apron was behind the counter, and a plump, well-girdled, in-credibly blonde woman was sitting on one of the stools, drinking coffee and eating Danish pastry.
The place was open. That was obvious. But the door was locked, or stuck, or something. Richie looked at the door, trying to figure out how to open it, and saw the bell-button on the right. He’d never been in Newport before. He’d never been much of anywhere before. As far as he knew, you had to ring the bell to get into all diners in Newport. Maybe that was the way they worked it.
He pushed the button.
The plump woman eased herself off the stool and padded to the door, looking heavy and ominous and much too mother-image. Even before she opened the door, Richie Parsons was terrified, his mind a daze.
The woman opened the door, and grinned at him. “The counter’s closed just now,” she said, speaking rapidly in an obviously-routine pattern. “Would you like to go back and see a girl?”
Richie was a blank. The woman had asked him a question, something that had sailed on over his head. He was afraid she suspected him, that she would turn any second and call the police: “We’ve got a Deserter here for you!”
He nodded, jerkily, hoping it was the right answer, hoping his face wasn’t giving him away, hoping he’d get out of this all right, and be able to hurry on out of Newport.
It was the right answer. The woman’s smile broadened, and she stepped back from the doorway, motioning to Richie to come in. He did, and followed her through a door to the right of the counter. She motioned for him to go on back, patted him chummily on the arm, and went away to the front again.
Richie, not knowing what else to do, barely knowing his own name at this point, kept on down the hall, and found himself in a dim-lit parlor, where a girl with reddish-brown hair and a smiling mouth was looking at him from where she sat in an over-stuffed chair near a doorway and a flight of stairs leading up.
The girl got to her feet and walked toward him, smiling, her eyes fastened on his, her body undulating gently as she moved. “Hi,” she murmured. “My name’s Honey.”
And Richie Parsons, numbly gripping the handle of the suitcase, finally realized he was in a whorehouse.
For Honour Mercy Bane, the last two weeks had been busy (though happily, not fruitful) ones. There’d been so much to learn, much more than she’d expected. It was, in many ways, more difficult to be a bad woman than to be a good woman. No good woman ever had to douche herself twenty times a day. No good woman had to keep smiling when her insides felt as though they’d been scraped with sandpaper; and here comes another one. No good woman had to try to be glamorous and desirable while doing the most unglamorous things in the world. Such as accepting money, and even sometimes (how silly could men get?) having to make change. Such as checking a man for external evidence of disease. Such as squatting over an enamel basin.
No good woman had to learn as much about the act of love, and its variations, as a bad woman did. And no good woman was exposed to quite so many variations all in one day.
Not that Honour Mercy Bane was unhappy in her chosen profession. Far from it. There were any number of things she enjoyed about it. First and foremost, of course, she enjoyed men. By the end of an eight-hour stint on her back, her enjoyment was usually on the wane, but she always snapped right back with it the next day, just as fresh and eager as ever.